A CAREER THAT HAS BLOOMED

From North Wales to Kent to Florida to Southampton, Dr Cathy Lucas’ love of the sea and the wildlife within it has dictated her impressive career from the get-go.

Dr Cathy Lucas has been with the University of Southampton for over 32 years. In that time, she has become an Associate Professor in Marine Biology and is dedicated to the University community.

Cathy has always been drawn to the sea and and has always lived in a coastal town or city.

Explaining her research, she said: “My primary interest is the study of jellyfish blooms, which is quite a specialised area. I didn’t start out like that though, my undergraduate degree was in Zoology at Swansea University because I had interests in so many areas of the animal kingdom. It was when I travelled to Australia and New Zealand after my degree and spent some time working at the Australian Institute of Marine Science in Townsville, that my path into marine wildlife and biology was secured.”

That trip Down Under led to Cathy applying to study for a PhD at the University of Southampton in the then Department of Oceanography. Her thesis was on ‘Gelatinous predators and their impact on the zooplankton community of Southampton Water’.

“It felt like fate when the PhD supervisor I was allocated revealed he came from the same town in Wales as me and did his undergraduate degree at Swansea as I had,” said Cathy. “With my PhD under my belt, I headed to Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution in Florida to undertake a oneyear post-doctoral fellowship studying deep-sea jellyfish.

“The fellowship was fascinating and studying in America was a real experience, but I was keen to get back to Southampton having enjoyed the University and the city so much during my PhD.”

Cathy returned in 1995 and undertook a three-year post-doc in the newly-created Southampton Oceanography Centre (renamed the National Oceanography Centre, or NOC, in 2005) on an EU-funded multidisciplinary project called ‘Eco-metabolism of an intertidal mudflat’. It involved working with colleagues in the Netherlands to model the physical, chemical and biological processes in sediment dynamics of estuarine tidal flats.

“This project was a significant departure from the jellyfish focus of my earlier research, and a steep but exciting learning curve,” said Cathy. “It was an opportunity to expand my breadth of knowledge in marine science. It led me on to another post-doc on an EPSRC-funded project in collaboration with Associated British Ports in Southampton investigating the effects of dredging on intertidal mudflats in the estuary.”

This change in focus was refreshing for Cathy but her heart was always with the jellyfish, and in 2002 she joined the University staff as a temporary Lecturer in Marine Biology. After 12 years of lecturing and raising her young children, Cathy became an Associate Professor in 2014.

“My dad was a Professor at Bangor University, and my late older brother was a marine scientist who lectured for over 30 years at the University of Cape Town, so perhaps I was always destined to work in academia,” said Cathy. “But I am sure the reason I have had, and continue to have, such a successful and interesting career in it is down in no small part to the University of Southampton, my colleagues and the departments here I have worked with over the last 30 years.

“Southampton University is connected and collaborative so from a PhD student through post-doc to staff member I have always had opportunities to work across teams, institutions and countries because Southampton is such a powerhouse in so many areas, particularly marine biology.”

Alongside being an Associate Professor, Cathy has also been Director of Undergraduate Recruitment in the School of Ocean and Earth Science for last six years, as well as undertaking other support roles across the institution including University open days, outreach events and sitting on various Faculty and University-level working groups.

“My research career and my specialism in jellyfish blooms coincided over several years with an international upturn in interest in this area, which has meant many opportunities for collaboration across the University and externally,” added Cathy. “I have had the opportunity to work with scientists in Australia, the USA, South Africa, Japan and across Europe – many of whom have become lifelong friends.”

The primary area of Cathy’s research in recent years has been on understanding the causes and consequences of jellyfish blooms.

“Using a combination of field sampling of coastal and estuarine jellyfish and laboratory experiments, I explore the effects of various physicochemical parameters on reproduction and life histories to determine what drives jellyfish population dynamics,” said Cathy.

“In addition, I am interested in the impact of jellyfish blooms, both socioeconomically on industries such as coastal tourism in the Mediterranean and UK, and on the structure of marine food webs, in collaboration with colleagues with expertise in carbon cycling in the marine environment, or oceans.”

RESEARCH AND COLLABORATION HIGHLIGHTS

• Cathy’s article Invasion of the strange sailor jellyfish for The Conversation in 2014 received more than 500,000 reads.

https://theconversation.com/ invasion-of-the-strange-sailorjellyfish-what-are-they-and-willthey-sting-us-31131

• Cathy wrote the scientist’s perspective on the Big Blue episode of Blue Planet 2, Jellyfish and Plastic in the Big Blue, for the Nature Ecology & Evolution journal in 2017.

https://ecoevocommunity.nature. com/posts/23851-plankton-andplastic-in-the-big-blue

• Pre-recorded and live interviews with Cathy have featured on the BBC’s Blue Planet UK series, The One Show, the BBC News Channel, radio stations (BBC R4’s Today

programme, BBC Radio Solent, USA national public radio), and the BBC’s Naked Oceans online programme, on jellyfish-related topics.

• Cathy was the scientific advisor on jellyfish for the BBC’s Blue Planet 2 series.

• She is a key member of the NCEASfunded Global Jellyfish Blooms Working Group and a leading co-author, with Dr Robert Condon, of the Jellyfish Blooms Database Initiative (JeDI), the first global database of in situ jellyfish presence and abundance data.

• Cathy attended the first International Jellyfish Blooms Symposium in Alabama in 2000. Since that first meeting, she has chaired sessions at the second (Australia), fourth (Japan), fifth (Spain) and sixth (South Africa) conferences.

Find out more www.southampton.ac.uk/oes